I disagree with your rules. Not that they are bad - often they are the correct things to do, but they are not the rule.
The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".
Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.
Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).
In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".
1. Sometimes we don't know what is most valuable (from the company's perspective).
2. It is easy to convince ourselves that whatever we want to do is really the most valuable thing (e.g., "Refactoring this massive subsystem will help the company in the long-term" or "Introducing this new technology (that I really like) will make it easier to recruit talent.")
That’s addressed in the article by the person who identified a need and came up with both a proposal and estimate to address it.
Now if that person just implemented completely with no feedback that would be very dangerous as it might not work, take longer, or management didn’t actually care about it very much. Getting to the point of proposal + estimate then sign off is the sweet spot.
I would encourage everyone to identify when these rules don't apply!
However, I think these rules are generally safer than the claim that you should do something other than what you've said you would do (or, perhaps, other than what your manager has said you will do)
And if you are doing something much more important, there's a new rule which was probably worth emphasizing more: communicate aggressively. Over communicate. If you're doing A but your manager thinks you are doing B, communicate quickly and often about why you are doing A, what the impact is, and when you will get back to B (or whether B should be deprioritized)
On re reading both of our replies I don't think we disagree:
> First, _. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured
And you say:
> Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do
Yes, sure! But if it's not what's expected, then you probably have additional work that is called "communicating impact". And unfortunately, if you want to get promoted, you are going to have to spend some time communicating impact (unless the impact is self-evident, in which case you have already successfully communicated the impact)
The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".
Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.
Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).
In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".